Existing User

A darkened corridor leads away from the busy brightness of
a museum lobby. Walking along this passageway, you are aware of the
faint sound of a woman's voice thrumming in the distance. At first,
the steady stream of her words is barely audible. She speaks low,
her diction clear but muted. The sound emerges from a dimly-lit
interior room, a triangulated gallery space in New York's Queens
Museum; it is an improvised space - an inner sanctum, part
make-shift theatre, part anthropological display - that houses an
installation of Lines in the Sand (2002), a multi-media
performance work originally created by Joan Jonas for
Documenta11.

Within this room, you can distinctly hear the soundtrack of a
woman, the artist [Jonas], speaking. 'There was something beating
in my brain,' she confides quietly. 'I do not say my heart. My
brain. I wanted it to be let out. I wanted to free myself of
repetitive thoughts and experiences - my own and those of my
contemporaries.' The timbre of her voice is sonorous and curiously
timeless. In describing an early work of Jonas's, her 1970
performance Mirror Check, the painter Mary Heilmann wrote:
'Her flat, hoarse yet resonant mono-tone catching haltingly in her
throat. She is nervous and composed at once.' That particular,
ineffable quality continues to infuse the sound of Jonas's work;
she speaks hesitantly, conveying a sense of nascent thought opening
slowly into language.

Jonas's deliberate narration of Lines in the Sand
accompanies a video projected onto a screen above a sandbox the
size of a small room - a mutable territory reminiscent of a
children's playground, a miniaturised desert or a Zen garden
constantly raked over into

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